com·press   (kəm-prěs')    tr.v.   com·pressed, com·press·ing, com·press·es To press together: compressed her lips. To make more compact by or as if by pressing. Computer Science To transform (data) to minimize the space required for storage or transmission: compressed the file so that it could be downloaded efficiently. n.   (kŏm'prěs') Medicine A soft pad of gauze or other material applied with pressure to a part of the body to control hemorrhage or to supply heat, cold, moisture, or medication to alleviate pain or reduce infection. A machine for compressing material. [Middle English compressen, from Old French compresser, from Late Latin compressāre, frequentative of Latin comprimere : com-, com- + premere, to press; see per-4 in Indo-European roots.]

Compress

Com*press"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Compressed; p. pr & vb. n. Compressing.] [L. compressus, p. p. of comprimere to compress: com- + premere to press. See Press.]

1. To press or squeeze together; to force into a narrower compass; to reduce the volume of by pressure; to compact; to condense; as, to compress air or water.

Events of centuries . . . compressed within the compass of a single life. --D. Webster.

The same strength of expression, though more compressed, runs through his historical harangues. --Melmoth.

2. To embrace sexually. [Obs.] --Pope.

Syn: To crowd; squeeze; condense; reduce; abridge.

compress

[Unix] vt. When used without a qualifier, generally refers to crunching of a file using a particular C implementation of compression by Joseph M. Orost et al. and widely circulated via Usenet; use of crunch itself in this sense is rare among Unix hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, "IEEE Computer", vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984), pp. 8-19.

compress 

Main Entry: ¹com·press
Pronunciation: k&m-'pres
Function: transitive verb
1 : to press or squeeze together compressing a nerve>
2 : to reduce in size or volume as if by squeezing <compress air>

compress com·press (kŏm'prěs')
n.
A soft pad of gauze or other material applied with pressure to a part of the body to control hemorrhage or to supply heat, cold, moisture, or medication to alleviate pain or reduce infection. v. com·pressed, com·press·ing, com·press·es (kəm-prěs')
To press or squeeze together.

compress
1. To feed data through any compression algorithm.
2. The Unix program "compress", now largely supplanted by gzip.
Unix compress was written in C by Joseph M. Orost, James A. Woods et al., and was widely circulated via Usenet. It uses the Lempel-Ziv Welch algorithm and normally produces files with the suffix ".Z".
Compress uses variable length codes. Initially, nine-bit codes are output until they are all used. When this occurs, ten-bit codes are used and so on, until an implementation-dependent maximum is reached.
After every 10 kilobytes of input the compression ratio is checked. If it is decreasing then the entire string table is discarded and information is collected from scratch.